The New York Times asked Gallup to come up with a statistical composite for the happiest person in America, based on the characteristics that most closely correlated with happiness in 2010. Men, for example, tend to be happier than women, older people are happier than middle-aged people, and so on.

Gallup’s answer: he’s a tall, Asian-American, observant Jew who is at least 65 and married, has children, lives in Hawaii, runs his own business and has a household income of more than $120,000 a year.

I was forwarded a recent article about the Gates Foundation and how it has partnered with news organizations like ABC News and The Guardian. And guess what? IHME makes an appearance in the second half of the second page! I wouldn’t say that it’s positive about my work, but I am delighted to see the technical appendix mentioned in print.

During my recent education in medicine, I’ve learned that an appendix is something that people think you don’t need. Also, if something goes wrong with it, it can kill you. And it’s true that the “webpendix” is 219 pages, but the bulk of that is pictures. The first 19 pages are a pretty decent stats paper about how we used Gaussian Processes to model really noisy time-series data.

Yearly percentage decline in mortality in children younger than 5 years between 1990 and 2010